Agnes and the Renegade (Men of Defiance) (5 page)

After a while, she sat up and reached for her sketchpad. She drew the landscapes in each of the four directions. She sketched the grass, details of the ground between the clumps of grass, sagebrush, yucca plants, tiny but vibrant wildflowers—all the elements that would form the texture and content of her paintings.
 

What she didn’t have yet was the mood for the pieces. Early afternoon was the worst time to study a place. So much sunlight might be good for photographs, but the glaring light didn’t work for oils. The best time to see a place was during the softer light of late afternoon to sunset, predawn to midmorning, or anytime a storm was in the air.

Now that she’d identified the location where her work would begin, she would do a few pencil studies in preparation for getting the work on canvas. She made a plan to be here before dawn and in the evening for the next few days to see what the sky told her about this beautiful land.
 

Chayton crouched in the recesses above the hill where the white woman sat. Weaponless, she was defenseless as a babe in a cradleboard. She wore a wide, flat-brimmed straw hat that obscured her features from his inspection, but he remembered those eyes. Blue, like flax. Her hair was a mixture of tones, brown and red and some lighter strands—blending like the colors of wet river stones. It was straight, like his. Today, she had it in a wide braid that fell halfway down her back. She wore a white shirt that buttoned in the front, decorated with strips of lacework his wife would have thought beautiful. The woman’s shirt was tucked into the waist of her simple brown skirt. She wore ugly black boots and stockings.

She didn’t seem aware of her surroundings, except through her frequent, mindless stares. Perhaps she wasn’t right in the head. Maybe that was why Logan was so protective of her. But if that were the case, why were none of her people with her? He watched her just sitting there. Sometimes she would bend her head to one side, holding still for so long, he wondered where she’d gone in her head. She wasn’t asleep, but she wasn’t awake. Logan had mentioned she was an artist, but not that she was deranged. After a while, she put her hat back on, took a pad of paper from her satchel, and started to scribble on it.
 

He watched her for the entire time she sat on his hill. Hours after she arrived, she returned to her waiting mount. The horse caught his scent and whickered, shifting to look up at him, but she ignored his warning.
 

Foolish, foolish woman.

CHAPTER FOUR

The site Aggie had selected to start her work was an hour’s ride from the cabin. In order to get there before the early spring sunrise, she had to leave her cabin at 3:00 a.m., which she did for an entire week, driven more by instinct than time, as she had no watch. Some days, she sat on her hill in the wee morning hours and watched the light move over her vista, catching the nuances of blue and yellow, shadow and sun, watching as the light told its story.
 

On those days, she would return to her cabin late morning to do chores and to sleep through the insipid light of the afternoon. In the late afternoon, she repeated the journey, watching the harsh afternoon light soften to pink and salmon and lavender, seeing the mood of her vista change until the shadows swallowed it.
 

Then one day, as she knew would happen, she didn’t make the trip at all. It was time to paint.
 

She stretched a canvas and set it up on one of her largest easels, then spent the night filling it with the images she’d stored away on her sketchpad and in her mind, working through the night by the weak light of her three lanterns.

* * *

For days, the blue-eyed white woman didn’t leave her cabin, except for brief visits to the little hut Logan called an outhouse and for stops to see to her horse in the corral. Was she ill? Chayton waited in the shadows of the cabin grounds, watching as the long spring evening faded into the night. Prior to this new behavior, she would go to sleep when darkness fell. But once again tonight, light glowed inside her cabin. It never went out.
 

He walked around the house and came to the front door, which was open. Looking inside, he saw the woman standing before a white board, painting. The smell in her cabin was heavy and astringent. He stood at her threshold for several long minutes. After their first encounter, he’d kept himself out of her sight, though she’d rarely been out of his.

He was uncertain how she would react to him, given his last visit. Very slowly, he moved out of the shadows and took a cautious step inside her cabin, uninvited. She did not look at him. He stood unmoving, waiting for her to acknowledge him. If she screamed or startled in any way, he’d make a quick exit. Still she didn’t look at him. He moved to stand more directly in front of her. She had only to look up from her board to see him.

She did not. He moved slowly closer to her, ever ready to run for the door, drawn toward her as if an invisible cord tightened between them.

With only the meager light from the lanterns, her hair looked dull and brown, nothing like it did in the sunshine. It was so fine it escaped from her braid. Her face was pale, dusted with faint little spots over her nose and cheeks. Her lashes were long and dark. Her brows arched over her eyes like narrow wings. Her mouth was soft looking, rounded. Her neck was slim, as were her shoulders. Her breasts made slight mounds in her shirt.
 

She was humming, the sound haunting in the enclosed space where she lived. Some paintings were set about the room. He walked over to them. The hairs lifted on his neck as he saw on the boards scenes from his hill—the mountains to the west, the ragged line of cottonwoods to the south, the wide, green prairie to the east. Each scene was captured on its little board in a perfect miniature of the actual space, as if she’d caught the land in her hand and set it free on this little surface.
 

A breeze crept inside and stirred the heavy smells in the room. Chayton wrinkled his nose, then followed the scents to the table beside the woman. A couple of thin pieces of wood stuck out of a glass jar. He bent and sniffed them—and found the source of the piney scent that was so astringent. Several small metal tubes were scattered about the table. He picked one up and sniffed it. It was squishy. He squeezed it, feeling the give in the tube as color coiled out from the opening. Chayton pinched the dark blue thread of color, then spread it between his fingers and sniffed it. This was the other heavy smell, thick like an oil of some type. He wiped his fingers on his sleeve. Deciding he liked the color, he pinched off another bit and swiped it on his other sleeve.
 

Still the woman took no notice of him. He stepped behind her to observe her work. Half of her white surface was covered with a black sketch of a scene, the other half was coming alive with the pigments she applied to the board. She was a being possessed by a spirit, creating.

He moved to stand beside her. How could she not know he was in her cabin, touching her things? And then it happened—she looked up at him. He held still, bracing himself for the chaos that was sure to break loose when panic hit her.
 

It didn’t. She looked him over from head to foot, then reached out to touch him. Her hand moved like that of a blind person, over his chest, his necklaces, and the decorations on his tunic. Her fingers lifted to his neck, over his choker, to the bare skin at his throat. She stared at his neck, at the way her fingers touched him. Once again, the skin between his scalp and back tightened.
 

The woman was not quite right. Her body was there in the room with him, but her mind was not. No sane woman would touch a warrior who was not of her family.

Her fingers lifted to touch his jaw, his cheek. She looked up at his face, his eyes. He was breathing heavily, shocked how good it felt to be touched by someone. A woman. A person not seeking to hurt him, someone who didn’t fear or condemn him. Her eyes were the blue he remembered, but darker in the dimness of her cabin. Her expression was soft. He realized then she wasn’t seeing him; she was seeing something else. She was with him in this room…and she wasn’t.
 

Suddenly, he knew what was going on; he’d interrupted this woman in the middle of a vision. A terrible transgression. He backed away fast, out of her reach, out of her cabin. Pinning himself flush against the wood siding beside her door, he waited for something to happen—the earth to shake or the skies to rage and smite him. He wasn’t sure what he’d witnessed, but it was unlike anything he’d ever experienced.
 

The woman was an Other. A
white
woman was an Other. No wonder Logan was so protective of her. He closed his eyes, regretting his desire to kill her that first night.

Chayton hid where he could watch the cabin unobserved. The blue-eyed Other worked until the light of dawn. When she left the cabin to go to the outhouse, he went into her cabin. He poured water into a tin cup, then left two pieces of jerky next to the cup on her workbench. He went around the side of the house, watching as she fed and watered her horse, then returned to her cabin to stand before her painting.
 

Reaching for her brush, she found the jerky. She bit into a piece. He was relieved when she sipped from the tin cup before resuming her work. He wasn’t certain whether her visions worked in the way his did, fueled by a lack of sleep and the deprivation of food. But she was such a slight woman, he didn’t know how she could survive the multi-day span of a vision unfed or unwatered.

He did not want to care for a woman, or a
wašíču
, but Others were sacred. For some unknown reason, the
Wakȟáŋ Tȟáŋka
had selected this woman, and being a warrior, he could not dishonor that choice. He sighed, knowing he would protect the female as she answered
Wakȟáŋ Tȟáŋka’s
bidding, even if it meant doing women’s work like cooking and serving her food and seeing to her horse.
 

When she showed no signs of stopping her work, he left to set up a rabbit snare so he could make a rich soup to nourish her for her journey that evening. Once the snare was set, he tended to her horse and his, grooming them, exercising them, testing the level of training her horse had received. He was a large quarter horse, in fine health. Chayton smiled as he thought how proud his people would have been had he gained such a fine animal in a raid.
 

That thought, as with all like it, was immediately followed by the knowledge that he no longer had a people. He had nothing. No one.
 

Not even this valley.

* * *

The marathon didn’t stop for days. The cabin’s air was rich with the heavy scent of linseed oil and oil paints, cut with the sweet, astringent scent of turpentine, even with a cross breeze from the open windows. When Aggie grew fatigued, all she needed to do was fill her lungs with the fragrance of her work, and she’d be right back in a place in her mind where the truth of her work lived. Sometimes, she propped herself up on a chair. When she remembered, she ate a bit of jerky or raisins. Twice she refilled her water bucket, but after that she wasn’t aware of being thirsty and didn’t seek out water.

On the morning of the fourth day, Aggie became aware of several things simultaneously. Her shoulder hurt. She was lying on her side on the hard cabin floor. The door was open and a cool breeze swept across the floor, tickling her hair. Her foot was hooked in the rungs of her stool, which lay on its side at her feet. There was a cup of water next to her face, upright and within reach.
 

And a man crouched in the doorway, watching her. She looked at him again. Not just any man—he was the renegade Indian who’d frightened her so terribly her first night. She blinked, holding her eyes shut for a long interval, hoping he would be gone when she opened them. She wasn’t strong enough to fight him off. He was still there when she opened her eyes, regarding her with a steady, unblinking gaze.
 

He couldn’t be there. He was too violent to be there. She couldn’t make out his features, backlit as he was by the bright morning light outside her cabin. He wore fringed leathers. His hair was braided and wrapped in wide leather strips that hung in front of his shoulders.
 

She shook herself, certain he was a lingering part of her strange reverie. She’d dreamed of him while she worked, touched his body, his face. She needed to wake up and rejoin the world. She pushed herself up into a sitting position and braced herself while her mind righted itself. She’d been painting for days on end.
 

Canvases of varying sizes were propped on every surface, drying. She looked to her left to see if she’d managed to set her palette down before collapsing. It rested on the table next to the easel she’d been working on. Good. At least she hadn’t wasted the paint on it. She sent a quick glance to the door and was relieved to see no one there. Tired and distraught from her extended period of hyper-creativity, she’d imagined the Indian then. She was always emotional coming out of these episodes.
 

She remembered the first time she’d succumbed to one of these extremely intense working sessions. Theo had been away visiting a client, delivering his latest commissioned piece. Aggie had spent years spying on him every time he’d been at work, memorizing his methodology; the original sketch he’d done for the piece, the way he transferred the sketch to the stretched canvas, the way he painted the background before the foreground, the color selections he used, even the arrangement of colors on his palette.
 

While he was gone, she’d found an unused canvas that was much smaller than the one he’d used. She’d recreated his entire work, a quarter of the size of his original. Then, as with her latest bout of painting, she’d worked until she was unconscious. She’d always been so careful not to disturb Theo while he was working, and when he wasn’t working, he had very little interest in making conversation with the little waif he’d brought home from the orphanage.